Ok well I don't know what to say about this round. It is terrible...... Probably one of the worst in LTC history and obviously not what we need as a small young pool.

We have seen a lot of miner leave and I can't blame them. Everyone needs to make a return on their rigs.

I totally understand if people need to go to another pool with a bigger hashrate. At the end of the day I set this up for miners and at the moment we are clearly not providing. Sadly this is something I can't control.

Something I can however is the block reward so I'm putting it up to 50 LTC this round. It won't help everyone I know and only one person will win it but it is a small thank you for the amount of effort people have put in during what has been a very very hard round.

There are no guarantees how long this round will last but I hope this helps.

So in short..... next block = 50LTC bonus.

Very awesome gesture

I'm keeping my hashpower on your pool untill (atleast) saturday evening, so i hope we get it by then

To be honest I launched it along side LTC123.NET but I'm focusing on LTC just now. I'm not at a place with the LTC pool yet where I'm happy yet. FTC pool will stay active and will be worked on when I'm happy enough with LTC.

I have been making some changes to the pool and I still have a couple to make.

Please can you see below and please feel free to provide feedback.

Difficulty

This has now been changed to 128 from 16. This means miners submit less shares and have to request less work from the server. For GPU miners this is a great change and also it helps people on slower connections. From my perspective it reduces server load dramatically freeing up overhead for when we are mining at 4Ghash ( :-P ).

One downside is that it has screwed up the percentages on the block stat page. It is still calculating them on the amount of shares we needed at diff 16. This will dwindle away as we find blocks at the new diff and will end up correct.

Payout System

One of the biggest requests was to transition back to PPLNS. This is now done. This rewards pool loyalty and means that the big hitters cant dump a lot of shares and move on. Everyone mining with us then are treated equal. PPLNS is set to take an average of the last 10 blocks so the PPLNS value will change slightly from round to round.

Competitions

Again from feedback. Monthly comps are gone. Block Finders Fees are here to stay all month and are still 5LTC each. Smaller prizes more often so I hope this is a welcomed change.

I also want some long term goals for miners so here they are....... 1600LTC worth of them :-)

3 milestones, 3 draws.

100Mhash, for 7 days = 100LTC

500Mhash, for 14 days = 500LTC

1000Mhash, for 28 days = 1000LTC

The more the pool grows, the more we pay out. Granted these prizes will not be won overnight but help the pool grow and unlock the next level.

Fee Changes

As planned from day 1 pool fees will be going up to 2%.

There are a lot of expenses to running a pool of this quality. We have multiple servers, a fibre connection, a lot of backup storage and not to mention the huge amount of LTC up for grabs. For the stability, support, quality and competitions on offer 2% is a modest fee.

Please note fee's will NEVER rise above 2%. There are no plans now or ever to raise it higher.

Transaction Fees have now been reduced to 0.02LTC from 0.05LTC. The amount of LTC you can keep in the Pool will increase from 60 - 100LTC.

This has been a month of ups and downs for the pool (mostly the hashrate). For September I would live to see us head back into the 50-60Mhash with 100 in sight. I will try to foster this as much as possible and hopefully we see new and old miners alike return to the pool and hopefully you guys can help do the same.

It is tough being a small pool and of course it will not be for everyone. The biggest problem people were finding was the long block times. This way people can enjoy regular payouts which I think means more to folks just now than those good lucky rounds.

Your right it takes the luck away from miners but it also takes the bad luck away too and this was something that seen the hashrates drop a lot. There are some great PPLNS & PROP pools out there and at 30Mhash the pool simply can't compete.

PPS gives miners the security of running on a small pool and puts the risk at my feet for those long rounds.

I think given the size of the pool this is a much better payout scheme for most.

I'm always happy to hear your input and criticisms alike and I'm sorry this has not been a good change for you.

Finally I'm going to lock off this thread now and start a new one to reflect the change to PPS.